These strange, seemingly random videos are apparently lost forever.Ĭreepypastas are, for all intents and purposes, the modern-day equivalent of campfire ghost stories. Masked men, people being killed, it’s all supremely alarming, and the “resolution” is that the narrator tries uploading the videos to other websites, only for them to be taken down. In one of my favorites, “ Normal Porn for Normal People,” a person with no name stumbles across the eponymous website, except instead of pornography, there are seemingly unrelated but disturbing videos on the site.

Instead, they tend to be stories of a person stumbling across something unexplainable and often horrifying.

They aren’t so much stories, per se, with clear resolutions, character motivations, or a strong plot. From the stories I’ve read in that sub-sub-genre, the common theme in the best ones is ambiguity. Penpal’s creepypasta origins are readily apparent. These pictures arrive for much longer than anyone else’s penpals, and from there the story is broken into a series of five vignettes of terrifying incidents that happened throughout the narrator’s childhood, before ending on the full story of what actually happened. A lot of their classmates receive responses that eventually stop, but the narrator instead receives cryptic pictures in the mail of seemingly random landmarks from nowhere. It turns out that the broad premise is that the narrator, who is never named or given a gender (although fans have taken to referring to them as Dathan after the author), once participated in a penpal project in kindergarten where his whole class wrote a letter to a stranger and let it go while tied to a balloon. It doesn’t take long, and there’s a shorter, free version available on the creepypasta wiki. I’m going to be discussing the full plot of Penpal and would encourage you to read it before reading this article.

Today, I’d like to discuss exactly why that is.īefore we continue, I firmly believe that this is a horror novel that works best when you know as little as possible about it going in. It hit me with the weight of a train that’s gone off the rails, and I’ve read it again since then, and honestly, that second time, where I knew everything that was coming, did nothing to diminish the story’s terrifying impact. It’s cheap, and it doesn’t take long to read, so I bought it and proceeded to read it in about a day through the course of two sittings. The information was scarce, but it had me sold. It was sold as a puzzle of sorts, where the protagonist and the reader learn pieces to some great, terrible truth about their past. I found the novel version of Dathan Auerbach’s creepypasta-turned-cult-hit Penpal almost by chance online one day.

Penpal by Dathan Auerbach